Indians as well as foreign observers of all kinds were quick to
call the November 26-29 massacres in Mumbai “India’s 9/11.”
Mercifully for India, the 10 terrorists who took part in the
attacks on 10 targets in Mumbai, including two luxury hotels, a
train station, and a Jewish guest house, failed to murder the
number of people they originally had in mind: 5,000. The September
11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon killed some 2,975
people.
But the Mumbai attacks were indeed India’s 9/11 in a different
sense. Suddenly, Indians of all political parties realized their
country was heartbreakingly vulnerable to a squad of determined and
well-trained terrorist thugs. Moreover, India was forced to
consider what its foreign policy should be after unmistakable
evidence emerged that it was in Pakistan that the plots against it
had been hatched, planned, and guided. India was now a central
target in al Qaeda’s overall jihad against the U.S. in particular
and the West in general. Mumbai was not just India’s 9/11, but the
world’s.
India’s vulnerability was evident at every stage of the attack.
Even before the terrorists made landfall on Mumbai’s Indian Ocean
coast, U.S. intelligence operatives had made clear to their Indian
counterparts, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) responsible for
foreign intelligence and counter-espionage, that NSA intercepts
indicated a likely terrorist attack on Mumbai, originating in
Karachi. Intelligence specifically identified the attackers as
connected to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmiri terrorist group founded
in the early 1990s. The Indian government acknowledged receipt of
this information but neither its navy nor its coast guard was able
to identify the terrorist vessel that was sailing from Pakistani
waters toward India. When the terrorists transferred from the
Indian fishing boat they had hijacked to Zodiac high-speed dinghies
for the final stage, they easily avoided Mumbai port security.
But it was when the attack was well under way in the Taj Mahal
and Oberoi hotels that Indian unpreparedness revealed itself most
fully. Once it was obvious that local police couldn’t handle the
siege, India’s National Security Guard commandos were summoned from
their base outside Delhi. They deployed quickly enough to Delhi
airport, but found no plane waiting to take them to Mumbai. It took
another two and a half hours to locate a military transport. But
once they arrived in Mumbai, their problems were not over; there
were no trucks or buses waiting to get them into town and they had
no maps of the hotels or adjacent areas. They had to wait another
hour until Mumbai municipal transport buses could be rounded up to
take them into the city. It was altogether nine hours before NSG
commandos got into action.
Once in action, the commandos certainly fought bravely, but
without any training or experience in hostage rescue. On hearing
that a Jewish hostelry in Mumbai, the Chabad House, had been
attacked, Israel immediately dispatched a group of its own
commandos to the city. While they waited in safe houses, Israeli
defense minister Ehud Barak pleaded with his Indian counterpart to
allow them at least to rescue the Chabad House hostages, all of
whom were Jewish. The Indians refused. “It was purely a matter of
pride,” explained a senior Indian journalist. Eventually, the NSG
commandos rappelled from a helicopter onto the Chabad House roof
and made their way down the stairs. By the time they had shot the
two terrorists in control of the residence, all the hostages had
been executed, most after torture so appalling that even Indian
medical examiners were horrified by what had been done to the
bodies.
INDIAN DOMESTIC POLITICAL uproar over the terrorist attacks was
immediate. Home Minister Shivraj Patil immediately offered his
resignation. The Indian government then announced it would
establish a federal agency to co-ordinate a national response to
the terrorist threat. It also said it would immediately establish
20 counter-terrorism police academies and beef up patrol boat
equipment for India’s cash-strapped coast guard, which has to
defend 4,650 miles of national coastline.
If it all seemed a case of closing the barn door after the
horses had bolted, there were plenty of Indians ready to point that
out. In fact, since 2004 an estimated 7,000 Indians have died in
terrorist attacks. Not all of these attacks were Islamist in
origin: India’s history of fratricidal Hindu-Muslim tensions
certainly accounted for many of the victims. Yet India’s suffering
at the hands of Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Kashmir-based groups goes
back at least to December 2001, when terrorists later identified
with this group attacked the Indian parliament. One prominent
Pakistan-based terrorist, Maulana Masood Azhar, founder of the
Kashmir-based Islamist group called Jaish-e-Mohammed, was actually
released from jail by India in 1999 as part of a deal to free
hostages from an Indian Airlines plane hijacked in Kandahar,
Afghanistan. Azhar made his way from Afghanistan back to Pakistan,
where he was held under house arrest for a year, then released in
December 2002.
Pakistan at first denied it was in any way connected to the
Mumbai massacre. One Pakistani TV station even attributed the
Mumbai incident to “Hindu Zionists.” But as pressure for an armed
response mounted from the outraged Indian public, Pakistani and
Indian officials alike were quick to tamp down any war talk. With
both countries in possession of nuclear weaponry, there would be no
room at all for miscalculation if hostilities were to break out.
Yet an Indian government official said that if before scheduled
national elections in 2009 there were another attack on Indian
civilians that could be traced to Pakistan, war between the two
countries would be “inevitable.”
Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, an Oxford-trained PhD in
economics, has conducted a pragmatic and broader foreign policy
since taking office in 2004. He has particularly expanded relations
with Israel, to the point that Israel is now India’s second-largest
defense contractor after Russia. Despite tense relations with
Pakistan over terrorism—culminating with the Mumbai
massacre—Singh has sought overall to continue talks aimed at
reducing bilateral tensions over Kashmir, whose control by India
since 1947 has spawned most of Pakistan’s Islamist groups targeting
India. But he now faces a major dilemma. Unless Pakistan seriously
curtails the activities of its anti-Indian domestic groups, public
pressure for India not to show itself “weak” could explode in a
grassroots demand to “punish” Pakistan.
Nowhere are officials more alarmed by this than in Washington.
Even since Mumbai, the U.S. has prodded Pakistan repeatedly to
clamp down on the Islamist terrorist camps in its territory. In
December, Washington successfully persuaded the UN Security Council
to impose sanctions on Lashkar-e-Taiba’s successor organization,
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, its chief, Hafiz Saeed, the notorious terrorist
Zakiur Lakhvi, JuD’s chief finance officer Haji Muhammad Ashraf,
and an Indian-born Saudi national and fundraiser in Saudi Arabia,
Mahmoud Ahmed Bahaziq. Those UN moves nudged Pakistani security
forces to raid the JuD camp in Muzaffarabad, detain Lakhvi and
others, and place Saeed under house arrest for three months. For
the Indians, though, this was insufficient; they felt the U.S. was
not doing enough to pressure Pakistan into suppressing its
terrorist groups.
The trouble is that the U.S. is hardly better placed to pressure
Pakistan than India is. Pakistan’s main problem is that it has been
under military rule for the vast majority of the time since it
became independent from Britain in 1947. Its army and its powerful
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization have had close
relations with both the Taliban and various anti-Indian terrorist
groups since at least the 1980s, when the U.S. relied upon Pakistan
to funnel military aid and equipment to the Afghan
mujahideen to fight the Soviets. The U.S. has tried
repeatedly, so far without success, to place Hamid Gul, a former
ISI chief who has been stridently critical of the U.S., on a UN
embargo list. Ironically, before she was killed, Benazir Bhutto had
written a letter to then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf
warning that, if she died by murder, Mohammed Gul should be among
the first people investigated. Gul has described U.S. attempts to
nab him as “hilarious.” As for Pakistan’s current democratically
elected president, Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s widower, he is not
considered strong enough to assert firm civilian control over
Pakistan’s cowboy military and intelligence apparatus.
He may not have to. There has been a sign of common sense
finally emerging within the military establishment in Pakistan.
Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar in December made an unusual
admission. “If the whole world is on one side,” he said, “Pakistan
does not have the strength to face the whole world. We can fight
against our enemies, but we can’t fight an economic war against the
whole world.”
Will the tangled political establishment of Pakistan come to the
same realization before even more damage is done by its home-grown
terrorists? Lashkar-e-Taiba’s goals are brazenly ambitious: to
bring down the regimes of India, the U.S., Israel, Russia, and
China in the cause of global Islamic jihad. Its reach in the past
has extended not only to successful fundraising in Saudi Arabia,
but also to sending jihadist agents into Iraq to fight the
Americans and to training terrorists from Egypt, Afghanistan,
Yemen, and Bangladesh. It is also very plugged in to the global al
Qaeda network. The head of the Kashmiri terrorist group
Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, Farooq Kashmiri, signed Osama bin Laden’s
1998 fatwa calling on the world’s Muslims to murder Americans.
For better or for worse, India has now emerged as a central
element in the aspirations of global jihadists. Though al Qaeda no
longer has direct control over all the various national Islamist
groups waging jihad, what seems to have happened is that several
well-run “franchises” of global Islamist terror are acting on their
own initiative, with or without Osama bin Laden’s or Ayman
al-Zawahiri’s approval. As EU leaders were preparing to gather in
Brussels in mid-December for discussions about the EU economy, for
example, Belgian police conducted 16 separate raids on suspected
Islamist targets around Belgium. Among the police discoveries: a
video tape in which one Islamist appears to be saying goodbye to
his friends and family prior to a planned suicide operation.
It’s significant that India, whose closest ally for many years
was the Soviet Union, has drawn increasingly closer to the U.S. in
the past decade. It remains an open question, however, whether the
U.S. can “protect” India and exert sustained pressure on Pakistan,
whether bilaterally or through the UN, to set its own house in
order. Sooner or later, Pakistan’s rulers, whether civilian or
military, will have to decide whose side they are on—al Qaeda’s or
civilization’s.
